With the Alexa Guard function, Amazon's smart speakers can monitor homes and detect intrusions such as smoke.
If they still most often act as funny gadgets, connected speakers could well change register by becoming real home automation stations. This is the wish of their designers, and in particular ofAmazon which has just endowed its models with a rather attractive function of home monitoring.
With Alexa Guard, the American giant's Echo speakers are now able to detect, via their integrated microphones, all kinds of suspicious noises., like a broken glass, and even sirens of fire or carbon monoxide detectors, and automatically report intrusions or fire starts by sending an alert to their user's smartphone. A particularly ingenious idea, which makes it possible to react quickly in the event of a problem. And who avoids investing in an expensive device or a specialized service. Better, as long as we have connected light bulbs, Alexa Guard can even automatically turn on lights to simulate a presence in the house or apartment ! Everything is set in the Alexa application, and we can imagine that new options will appear soon.
Fortunately, this monitoring device does not work all the time. To activate it, you must tell Alexa Guard that you are leaving the home with a key phrase: "Alexa, I'm leaving" ("Alexa, I'm leaving"). Certainly, Alexa will know that the home is empty of any occupant, which can pose a problem of confidentiality to those who worry, rightly, to give private information to an artificial intelligence which records everything on servers ... But it is undoubtedly the price to pay to limit the risks of burglary or domestic accident.
A question that does not yet arise here, because Alexa Guard, which Amazon presented last year, is currently only available in the United States, where the function was tested for several months, as can be seen in the video that Amazon made to extol the merits of its solution. However, nothing is opposed to its generalization in other countries, including our country.. Nor that Google and Apple are developing similar tools on their own connected speakers ...
Illustrations : © Amazon
